NVIDIA is seriously considering a line of external notebook graphic cards

Everyone is well familiar with the tradeoffs in buying a notebook: on the one hand, you get a sleek, portable machine; on the other hand, you pay more for less, and can’t do significant upgrades to your machines. It’s really a dilemma that only troubles the home case builder, since upgrading a machine is beyond the reach of most consumers, all of whom would much rather own a computer they can easily sling in a bag and take on the go with them.

Still, while upgrading a notebook’s grafted silicon innards is difficult, the industry has experimented with external notebook graphic cards before… but they’ve failed to usually take it very seriously. That seems like it’s about to change with NVIDIA, though: a report from tech site Fudzilla suggests they are ready to seriously start looking at making external graphic cards for notebooks into the mainstream.

Fusion and Intel’s Sandy Bridge solution will put a lot of weight on Nvidia but Mr. Hass, [General Manager of Nvidia’s Notebook group] told Fudzilla that the company is working on its version of external graphics. He believes that AMD did a good job with Lasso, despite a few flaws that kept it from being success… it was a shot in the right direction.

In truth, with GPUs being the bottleneck that ages most laptops prematurely, launching a serious line of external graphic cards for notebooks that plug in through the PC slot makes a lot of sense. It’s also an interesting solution to the problems with battery usage that plague beefier mobile GPUs (just yank out the card when you’re away from an outlet) and would allow even entry-level notebooks to be upgraded into beefy gaming machines down the line. We approve.